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Noctis Horrendae posted:I don't think it's necessary to relate to a game focused on combat with a posthuman giant spaceman in a mid-budget game with the plot of an 80's B movie. You probably want a marketable character in a relatively big budget action game.
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Jan 31, 2014 21:58
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Improbable Lobster posted:You probably want a marketable character in a relatively big budget action game. Why? When people buy 40k games, they go into them expecting (or they should) over the top violence, corny plots and bad characters. These are what make 40k video games fun. That's why Space Marine was bad; it was missing bad characters.  I figured it out. Case closed, guys.
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Jan 31, 2014 22:01
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I think GW has slowly tried to shift away from the over-the-top pastiche. Yeah, it's still there, but I think they're obviously trying to be less 'slaneeshi space marines ride to battle on demon guitars' and more 'guys take us seriously, please'.
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Jan 31, 2014 22:13
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Noctis Horrendae posted:Why? When people buy 40k games, they go into them expecting (or they should) over the top violence, corny plots and bad characters. These are what make 40k video games fun. That's why Space Marine was bad; it was missing bad characters. Yes, this is entirely why we have a massive thread
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Jan 31, 2014 22:26
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Saith posted:Yes, this is entirely why we have a massive thread That was a joke, come on. I guess it's not clear because it's the internet. Realistically, there's only a few good GW writers and we tend to make fun of the war porn writers often.
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Jan 31, 2014 22:35
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Even the bad writers are trying to be serious nowadays - they're just bad at it.
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Jan 31, 2014 22:54
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Nephilm posted:Even the bad writers are trying to be serious nowadays - they're just bad at it. Such as? I haven't read any new 40k books recently. Lemme guess - the Ciaphas Cain author is writing war pork now?
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Jan 31, 2014 23:22
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SUPER NEAT TOY posted:I think GW has slowly tried to shift away from the over-the-top pastiche. Yeah, it's still there, but I think they're obviously trying to be less 'slaneeshi space marines ride to battle on demon guitars' and more 'guys take us seriously, please'. See this is where they hosed up. Daemon guitars are an awesome way to ride.
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Jan 31, 2014 23:34
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Noctis Horrendae posted:Such as? I haven't read any new 40k books recently. Lemme guess - the Ciaphas Cain author is writing war pork now? Every HH book that's not written by Abnett or ADB.
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Jan 31, 2014 23:39
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SUPER NEAT TOY posted:I think GW has slowly tried to shift away from the over-the-top pastiche. Yeah, it's still there, but I think they're obviously trying to be less 'slaneeshi space marines ride to battle on demon guitars' and more 'guys take us seriously, please'. It's the whole former fanboys becoming new writers thing. A lot of them don't quite get it. Well that and it's often quite hard to tell a joke with a straight face.
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Feb 1, 2014 02:20
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Honestly it doesn't need to be a joke. Think about it from the perspective of a guardsman. You're on your first deployment to a combat zone, and you know you're going to be fighting heretics. You expect blood. You expect screaming. You fear they might have a psyker with them. Then you see some monstrous caricature of a man, colored in impossible hues, screaming his way toward you on a ridiculously large stringed instrument. You have about five seconds to think before he reaches you. You waste that time wondering what in the God-Emperor's name is heading towards you.
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Feb 1, 2014 03:43
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VanSandman posted:Honestly it doesn't need to be a joke. Think about it from the perspective of a guardsman. You're on your first deployment to a combat zone, and you know you're going to be fighting heretics. You expect blood. You expect screaming. You fear they might have a psyker with them. I think there's a difference between "is a joke" and "is also played as a joke." Because playing what you described seriously doesn't stop it from being a (great) joke. It's probably funnier if it's played straight, and if it's played as an actual joke it's just dumb.
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Feb 1, 2014 11:48
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I think we can all agree that modern 40k takes itself a bit too seriously. Goofy things like gigantic, bulky men wearing deep purple armour and killing you by forcing you to listen to terrifying, demonic black metal is part of what makes 40k so fun. GW needs to look at RT and restructure the lore to get a proper balance between goofy and serious.
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Feb 1, 2014 18:56
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I'd prefer if it finished the transition to serious.
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Feb 1, 2014 19:11
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Nephilm posted:I'd prefer if it finished the transition to serious. I want them to keep the goofy and silly elements and just treat them seriously in fiction.
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Feb 1, 2014 19:15
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DirtyRobot posted:I think there's a difference between "is a joke" and "is also played as a joke." Because playing what you described seriously doesn't stop it from being a (great) joke. It's probably funnier if it's played straight, and if it's played as an actual joke it's just dumb. The single best instance of this I've encountered was in ADB's follow-up to Helsreach, in which he recounted a mission where he accompanied an inquisitor to investigate a potential chaos cult. They got around to fighting a daemon, and it was written as a tense, desperate battle against something near-impervious to physical harm. Grimaldus ends up employing a blessed explosive relic in the fight, and it seemed every bit like a serious fight, since it was definitely written that way. It wasn't until afterwards that I realized, "Wait, Grimaldus threw a Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch at that thing." It was literally from Antioch. So yes, I'm in the "over-the-top stuff played straight-faced is the best" crowd. But as others are saying, it takes a bit of skill to include stuff like that without being too obvious or hokey about it. So like so many other things, that usually means the book's being written by one of the more talented authors.
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Feb 1, 2014 19:16
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VanSandman posted:I want them to keep the goofy and silly elements and just treat them seriously in fiction. This. There would be nothing funnier than an Imperial Guard commissar breaking down into tears at the sight of a Slaaneshi guitar.
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Feb 2, 2014 01:13
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I've been listening to Thousand Sons on audiobook and I may have missed a bit here and there, but at some point don't Magnus the Red and Leman Russ engage in some crazy psychic avatar battle against each other in front of the legions? Oh, and what the gently caress is the deal with his wolves? One pure white and one black as night? That must be some weird genetic engineering trick or are they manifestations of his psychic might?
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Feb 2, 2014 07:44
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Nephilm posted:I'd prefer if it finished the transition to serious. VanSandman posted:I want them to keep the goofy and silly elements and just treat them seriously in fiction. It's 40k, there's *room for both*. There's room to play otu basically any fantasy and sci-fi styles, genres and tropes you could possibly want to in a universe where entire worlds get lost in administrative errors.
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Feb 2, 2014 09:53
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Cream_Filling posted:It's the whole former fanboys becoming new writers thing. A lot of them don't quite get it. It's not even just with the writers. Large parts of the entire company don't get the fluff and take it super seriously. I remember reading an article by one of the older employees about an incident involving the guys in the mail room not wanting to be known as the 'Mail Order Trolls' but wanting to be called Space Marines. The author made a pretty cool comment how instead wanting to be fun loving monsters that could kill mounted knights by vomiting on them, the people working at Games Workshop wanted to be chemically castrated manchildren.
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Feb 2, 2014 12:05
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Kegslayer posted:It's not even just with the writers. Large parts of the entire company don't get the fluff and take it super seriously. I remember reading an article by one of the older employees about an incident involving the guys in the mail room not wanting to be known as the 'Mail Order Trolls' but wanting to be called Space Marines. The author made a pretty cool comment how instead wanting to be fun loving monsters that could kill mounted knights by vomiting on them, the people working at Games Workshop wanted to be chemically castrated manchildren. Yeah, it's possible to write a decent 40k novel without realizing that Space Marines are a child's fantasy of adult masculinity, but then you'd better not have Space Marines in your novel.
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Feb 2, 2014 12:55
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What language do the Chaos Space Marines speak? I imagine it's some form of Gothic, but then again, maybe the higher-up Marines like Champions and Lords speak the language of their god. I've never found any solid answers on this.
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Feb 2, 2014 18:14
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Noctis Horrendae posted:What language do the Chaos Space Marines speak? I imagine it's some form of Gothic, but then again, maybe the higher-up Marines like Champions and Lords speak the language of their god. I've never found any solid answers on this. Like every answer in 40k, it's some combination of "it depends" and "nobody knows". For instance, in ADB's books, the Night Lords mostly speak Nostroman, a language that's effectively been dead for about 9 millenia except for them. And even that is colored by their own specialized battle languages or whatever as well as whatever centuries of conscious time have passed for them. It's assumed that many of the old legionaries will speak whatever they spoke during the crusade. But then again, there's implied that there's specific chaos tongues as well, either somehow organic to chaos (possibly even a magical language with evil powers) or else the remnants of human/alien cultures that were warped by chaos and are now indelibly associated with it. It's even unclear whether Low Gothic itself is a single language that serves as a lingua franca, a rough family of languages, or a haphazard grouping of languages that's considered dialects of a single language for political/religious purposes. All we know is that it's whatever the narrator speaks and it's rendered as English out of convenience, just like High Gothic is rendered as (broken) latin.
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Feb 2, 2014 18:30
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Cream_Filling posted:Like every answer in 40k, it's some combination of "it depends" and "nobody knows". If I remember right, there was some mention of the Black Tongue in the Blood Angels omnibus, but this seemed exclusive to the Word Bearers and was only used by the higher-ups. I guess most warbands would speak the language of their home planet - that makes sense. I /think/ the Tzeentch worshipers might speak the Chaos tongue you referred to in that post when attempting to summon daemons, but that's the only solid talk I've really heard of a Chaos language.
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Feb 2, 2014 18:42
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VanSandman posted:Yeah, it's possible to write a decent 40k novel without realizing that Space Marines are a child's fantasy of adult masculinity, but then you'd better not have Space Marines in your novel.
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Feb 2, 2014 21:22
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Baron Bifford posted:Do Space Marines shout everything they say? Yes. Most definitely. When reading a SM novel, read every piece of dialogue as though it was written in all caps and you'll enjoy it a lot more. Guaranteed.
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Feb 2, 2014 21:43
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There's a constant barrage of micro earthquakes where ever Space Marines go. The impossibly deep base of their voice reverbs through the very fabric of space, like tectonic plates shifting through a tormented earth, like a glacier carving through a mountain, like the laughter of Michael Clarke Duncan.
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Feb 2, 2014 23:56
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Donnerberg posted:There's a constant barrage of macro earthquakes where ever Space Marines go. The impossibly deep bass of their voice reverbs through the warp, killing daemons everywhere, like the laughter of Michael Clarke Duncan. Ftfy! Made your post several orders of magnitude more accurate.
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Feb 3, 2014 00:00
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Well, it looks like I have myself an editor. Let's go sign up at the Black Library. 
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Feb 3, 2014 00:02
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Cream_Filling posted:Like every answer in 40k, it's some combination of "it depends" and "nobody knows". The Ravenor books and Pariah has some "words of power" that are supposedly bits of a long-dead language tied to Chaos. One or two of the correct words is shown to be capable of killing a guy. As for Low Gothic the impression I've gotten is that each system or sub-sector have their own dialect, and while two neighbouring systems' dialect might sound almost the same a Cadian and a Tallarn might have dialects that differ enough that they have some issue understanding each other. For example the Ciaphas Cain books mention "klom" as a Valhallan word for kilometer. Or, to get back to Gaunt's Ghosts, in one of the later books; Traitor General I believe it was called, there's a group of partisans who still talk like the original settlers of the planet, something that is close to but still distinct from the current High Gothic. Then add to that that Space Marine Chapters have their own codes and shorthand terms, so that a Black Templar listening in on a Salamanders vox channel might not have a clue what the orders mean. It sort of comes up in Cadian Blood when a whiteshield tells an off-world commissar that "Unbroken" doesn't mean what he thinks it means.
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Feb 3, 2014 00:59
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Donnerberg posted:Well, it looks like I have myself an editor. Let's go sign up at the Black Library. I think we'd be much better than half of the current BL writers.
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Feb 3, 2014 01:13
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Donnerberg posted:There's a constant barrage of micro earthquakes where ever Space Marines go. The impossibly deep base of their voice reverbs through the very fabric of space, like tectonic plates shifting through a tormented earth, like a glacier carving through a mountain, like the laughter of Michael Clarke Duncan. James Earl Jones or bust I say.  Groetgaffel posted:All the Chaosy dudes in Gaunt's Ghosts speak their own language. Which I recall from Sabbat World Crusades that it's essentially a massive hodgepodge of languages and dialects of all the regiments that joined with the Blood Pact and thusly make it sheer hell to decipher.
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Feb 3, 2014 01:23
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Groetgaffel posted:All the Chaosy dudes in Gaunt's Ghosts speak their own language. The Low Gothic thing sounds like the late Roman Empire where Latin gradually devolved into the Castillan/Romantic language group, so that makes sense.
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Feb 3, 2014 01:29
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Noctis Horrendae posted:The Low Gothic thing sounds like the late Roman Empire where Latin gradually devolved into the Castillan/Romantic language group, so that makes sense. Which neatly parallels the partisans from Gaunt's Ghosts I mentioned. A small relatively isolated population with a language that haven't changed as much.
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Feb 3, 2014 02:35
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Noctis Horrendae posted:The Low Gothic thing sounds like the late Roman Empire where Latin gradually devolved into the Castillan/Romantic language group, so that makes sense.
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Feb 3, 2014 02:37
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Baron Bifford posted:Do languages devolve? Are you saying that Spanish and French speakers are backward rubes? That's a dumb but hilariously accurate typo. Latin is endlessly cooler sounding than Spanish and French.
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Feb 3, 2014 02:40
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Nephilm posted:I'd prefer if it finished the transition to serious.
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Feb 3, 2014 02:47
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One Legged Cat posted:The single best instance of this I've encountered was in ADB's follow-up to Helsreach, in which he recounted a mission where he accompanied an inquisitor to investigate a potential chaos cult. They got around to fighting a daemon, and it was written as a tense, desperate battle against something near-impervious to physical harm. Grimaldus ends up employing a blessed explosive relic in the fight, and it seemed every bit like a serious fight, since it was definitely written that way. I love ADB and all, but the Holy Orb (as well as the Battle of Fire and Blood in general) has been around since Black Templars got their own Codex. There's even an Orb on the BT upgrade sprue.
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Feb 3, 2014 04:12
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Noctis Horrendae posted:That's a dumb but hilariously accurate typo. Latin is endlessly cooler sounding than Spanish and French. Though latin itself existed in a variety of forms over the years and the surviving classical latin is just a remnant/development of it.
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Feb 3, 2014 04:28
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Cream_Filling posted:Though latin itself existed in a variety of forms over the years and the surviving classical latin is just a remnant/development of it. Don't you dare educate me! I refuse to believe that the Latin we can learn today is anything other than the Latin the early Ancient Romans spoke. 
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Feb 3, 2014 04:55
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